Reason and history

I didn't set out to write a series of posts on theories and approaches to history. But I have another one.

This one has to do with an essay by philosopher Terry Pinkard, who specializes in German philosophy from the late 18th century (Kant) on to the present. The essay is on the contemporary philosopher Charles Taylor, "Taylor, 'History,' and the History of Philosophy" (From Charles Taylor, Ruth Abbey, ed., 2004).

Describing Taylor's view of history, Pinkard writes, 'The line [of development] in history does not, and need not, run in a straightforwardly progressive direction." This, of course, speaks to the Enlightenment concept of progress in history. This view envisions progress in human societies over time, but recognizes that there can be setbacks, even huge setbacks. It's often said that in the West, the First World War was a major inflection point after which it was difficult or not impossible to view history as a story of continual human progress.

Taylor's view of history gives emphasis to understanding history from the "inside," by which Taylor means understanding how people at a given time viewed what was happening to them, as well as from the "outside," looking at larger sociological, economic or other collective processes and how they shape events without the full consciousness of the individuals involved.

Pinkard likens this to the distinction that Hegel made between "empirical" and "philosophical" history, which Pinkard describes this way:

Philosophical history cannot challenge the facts of empirical history, and it must be consistent with them; its task, though, is different in that it looks at the meaning of history and whether there is any rationality, or reconciliation, to be found in its events. It does not ask if history, or any particular agent or collective was actually aiming at the result in which we find ourselves; it asks instead if there is any way to say that any of the transitions in the understanding of what it means to be human can be counted as more rational than what came before in some nonquestion-begging way that does not presuppose at the outset some conception of rationality that is itself at issue.

Such philosophical history need not recount all the contingencies of history that go to make up the story we now tell about it. [my emphasis]

This is Taylor's way of accounting for reason in history.

Hegel based his theory of history on the view he elaborated in his Phenomenology of Spirit. He viewed all developments in the material world as an unfolding of reason in a dialectical process within what he called the World Spirit. By the mid-19th century, even thinkers working in the Hegelian tradition found the concept of the World Spirit no longer usable. But the notion of reason unfolding in history is very much with us today.

Pinkard illustrates that view of rationality in history with this quote from Taylor in his Sources of the Self, “What probably made Locke the great teacher of the Enlightenment was that he offered a plausible account of the new [Galilean] science as valid knowledge, intertwined with a theory of rational control of the self; and that he brought the two together under the idea of rational self-responsibility.”